Anne Rice silenced doubting Thomases in 2005 when she wrote “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” a novel narrated by Jesus of Nazareth. Whatever that book was, it wasn’t another semi-pornographic vampire story. It was a genuinely stirring display of piety, rich with the fruits of Rice’s copious research into the Gospels.

Rice now delivers a second installment: “Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.” And as it jumps forward toward the adulthood of its narrator, the new Rice steers the story toward passions that the old Rice understood.

Piety courts brazenness as “The Road to Cana” raises personal questions about its main character, since Yeshua bar Joseph (its name for Jesus) is now over 30. Rice describes this stage of his life with awe and respect. But she does present Yeshua as the subject of rumors – said to be what was once called a confirmed bachelor. And she gives him a crush on a 15-year-old relative.

So “The Road to Cana” perches on the brink of blasphemy. But it succeeds in treating Yeshua’s humanity as an essential part of his divinity. That humanity nearly takes the form of bodice-ripping (“The man in me knew that we were alone, and the man in me knew that I could have this woman”), now that Rice’s confidence about her daunting subject allows some of her familiar proclivities to emerge.

The first half of this book lingers eagerly upon its characters’ unfulfilled desires. In its opening scene, Yeshua’s thoughts of Avigail, his beautiful “young kinswoman,” lead him straight to a cold bath in a Nazareth spring. But Rice also presents the bigger biblical picture: ongoing tensions between the Jewish community, of which Yeshua is part, and all-powerful Rome, with the threat of Pontius Pilate’s army on the horizon.

But “The Road to Cana” keeps Yeshua at the center of its broad canvas. And once his pining for Avigail and regret about her imminent marriage are put to rest, the book is free to describe the majesty of Yeshua’s transformation.

At the novel’s precise midpoint, Avigail throws herself at Yeshua with the steam heat of a Rice vampire, sobbing, “I am your harlot.” Yeshua fights back his desires in order to refuse her.

“You’re really the child of angels,” she realizes, in a tone of disappointment. But the book is clear in purpose and bound for glory from this point on.

And Rice, when inspired, can deliver hypnotic, incantatory prose that celebrates Yeshua’s ascension.

“I moved slowly towards what was at last going to separate me from all around me,” he says as he begins to feel the divinity within him. Many readers will be lured by the promise of simply rendered holiness to “The Road to Cana.” Here are its rewards.

“I had to see it beyond hamlet or town or camp,” Yeshua says, embarking on his road of no return. “I had to seek it where there was nothing but the burnt sand, and the searing wind, and the highest cliffs of the land. I had to seek it as if it was nowhere and as if it contained nothing – when in fact it was the palm of the hand that held me.”

Then “The Road to Cana” actually sets itself on the road to Cana: to the place where Jesus’ first miracle is performed, as described in the Gospel of John. With John the Baptist (John bar Zechariah) and Satan (“Ahriman, Mastema, Satanel, Satan, Lucifer”) now present and aware of Yeshua as their Messiah, the book moves to the wedding at Cana. Here is when Yeshua transforms water into wine.

Rice presents this miracle as she has the other biblical events on which her fiction is based: She decoratively embroiders the Gospels while fully respecting their message.

In her version, the wedding becomes that of Avigail, who is an entirely fictitious character. The absence of wine at the wedding becomes calamitous, though the Bible describes it without alarm.

“It was a disaster of unlikely and dreadful proportions,” Rice maintains.

The book ends on a note of promise, mindful of how much more is yet to come.

“Whatever it was, well, it had only begun,” Yeshua says, signaling that Rice’s rendering will be epic and sustained. And with what sounds more like a politician’s voice than a Messianic one, Yeshua declares: “I’ve entered history for the whole of it. And I won’t be stopped.”